He said the word as though he hated it. “Twosome.”
There was more here, of course. So I waited again. Then, quietly: “And who would the second player have been, Wes?”
“Didn’t show.” But he hesitated here, knowing the end was near. Glanced at his fingernails where they rested on the edge of the table. Where I could have told him, they remained as dirty as when he’d come in.
“Mr. Frick,” Wes said.
I sat at Griegson’s desk, irritable, fussed. Smoking, butting it out. Lighting it up again. Meant nothing. Probably meant nothing. Or nothing meant nothing, probably. I phoned the Destinex number again and let it ring twenty times. When I hung up and set the phone down, it rang again almost immediately. Frick.
I said: “I was just thinking about you.”
Fricked sighed, far away. He said: “I spoke to Wes. You’ve upset him.”
“Terribly sorry, old man.”
“Caddies are delicate business, you know. And we really do rely on them around here.”
“Wes and Griegson,” I said. “Were they lovers?”
Frick sighed again. “In a situation like Sunshine City, in a life situation of this kind, situated as that situation is within a larger global situation, or even set of situations . . .”
“Hoss losing patience,” I said.
“I’m just trying to explain something that you might not appreciate—coming, as you do, from the relative freedom of the Rough.”
“Frick comes to his point,” I said, voice raised.
Frick held the phone away from his head a retributive moment. Then came back. “There are relationships that develop here that are of utmost importance. And in Sunshine City, in our present situation, the caddy and player is the key.”
I lit up again. I said: “Getting on the green in two is that important.”
“It’s much more than that, Hoss,” Frick said. “A member’s caddy is like a butler, a fixer, a life partner. The caddy, in turn, needs the sponsorship of a member.”
I said: “And who’s your caddy, Frick.”
Frick said: “All right. Well, you see. This is perhaps a background detail worth nothing. Games go up and down, you shake things up.”
“You were in the process of hiring Westlake away from Griegson.”
“They can work for more than one member, Hoss,” Frick said.
“Not if two members play together. Why was Griegson drunk in the clubhouse Wednesday night?”
Frick laughed. “Just Wednesday?”
“Good drunk. Different drunk.”
Frick sighed.
“He was upset,” I said.
“Hoss, I won’t deny it. Griegson has had better months.”
“You were fighting over a caddy, Frick,” I said. “Do you hear that as fucked up as normal people hear it?”
“You mean normal like you, Hoss?” Frick said.
“Why not show up to play Thursday morning?”
“Slept in,” Frick said. “Honestly, I slept in.”
“Off the top of your head, no pause,” I said. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Frick said.
“Number of times you slept in last year.”
“Maybe twelve, fourteen,” Frick said. Fast. It was right there waiting, the estimate.
Which was just bullshit, ten times out of ten with a margin of error of 0.0%. Frick forgot that I knew him. Frick didn’t carry the old college pal memories around like I did. Frick didn’t carry around the pointless memories, like despair itself. So here I was making neither a guess or giving voice to a hunch. This was a data set riding down hard on a fact: Frick hardly slept.
Feelings. Stable and old feelings. IAF feelings, this closing of forms, this development of probabilistic shapes. These ones, admittedly, taking on a ghostly aura. Frick hovering in the event, at some wrong distance from it. Why had he brought me here? Did he think I’d sense him in the weave of things, then exonerate him for old-time’s sake? Stupid fuck.
I watched SaBe at the deck rail at Griegson’s place. She was looking down towards the fairway and a snip of sand trap. Someone had just lost a ball and two caddies were looking through the undergrowth, swinging ball-retrievers like scythes. Birds flew against the dome of blue overhead. Strafing the fairways and soaring away. The caddies stood, hands on hips now, talking. The members were sitting in the golf cart behind them, one of them smoking a long thin cigar.
“Bet they don’t find that ball,” I said to her.
She smiled without looking at me. “They never do. They don’t look.”
I went over to the railing, looking down past her shoulder. “Why not look?”
“Oh God,” she said, infinite boredom grabbing her between breaths. A killing boredom. She said: “I don’t know. Balls are insured?”
“What about strokes lost, scores taking a hit? That leader-board counts for something.”
She looked over at me with a narrow smirk. “That leader-board counts for almost everything. But you’ve heard of cheating.”
I watched the caddies carefully. When they split apart from one another again to continue searching, I saw one go sharply to a squat in the long grass, a few feet short of the rough and the fairway beyond that. I couldn’t make out the words but he was calling now. Waving an arm. Magic. He’d just found the ball. I could picture what had happened in the invisible detail here. A matching Titleist 9 dribbled out of the low side pocket of his cargo pants. Just propped up nicely now where it could be punched out to the brow of the rise. Buddy with the cigar was going to loft in a sand wedge from there, get stuck on in three with a playable par. Rankings and positions, the whole architecture of club esteem unchallenged, unswayed. So Sunshine City continued to spin in its even grooves. Were they thinking of Griegson down there? The inexplicable thing to me, just at that moment—crows high overhead and the scent of SaBe close at hand—was my certainty that they were in fact thinking of Griegson then. Guy-chortling their way through the morning, they were nevertheless seeing themselves in debt to the misfortune of a single member down. The numbers gimp up there at work in the cabanas would make sure that club life carried on. The fine balance would be maintained. There would be no cloud, no plague from the outside. The seafoam green, the canary yellow, the Cadillac pink, the madras plaid and seersucker, the whole rainbow of politesse and clueless remove would continue.
SaBe said: “Hoss?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Thinking.”
“What do we have?”
“Okay,” I said. “So Griegson is carrying a card for someplace in the Rough. Meaning he’s been out there.”
SaBe made a doubtful face. Members hardly ever left.
“What about lifetime members,” I asked her.
She didn’t look at me. Didn’t show me her face. But I heard the words. SaBe said: “Some lifetime members are dying to get out there.”
“Humour me,” I said. “Griegson has this card. If he were going to go out there, he would have needed.”
“A map,” SaBe said.
We searched Griegson’s cabana for maps. For anything map-like. A hand-jot on a napkin. Lat/longs scribbled in the margin of a bank statement. Directions bookmarked in the map browser on his computer. Nothing and nothing. I punched up the Des-tinex coordinates again and stared at the map of where we’d been, with no indication that Griegson had ever done the same, much less actually gone out there. Which is just the moment I felt her lean in, felt her warmth at my shoulder, her breath at my ear. SaBe, SaBe. She was having her effect.
She said: “How about satellite view?”
I watched the landscape re-compute itself. Destinex down there in the patchwork brown. I tapped the zoom button, once, twice, three times. I could recall the angle of the street. Where the Bartinsons Private Solutions guy had told us to stop. Where SaBe had actually stopped next to the car wash. I thought I could see our tracks in the dust there, the distinctive double-tread of the quad. I wondered about how often these images were now updated, daily, hou
rly.
Then I saw the Destinex warehouse itself. The shape of the front awning. I zoomed more. SaBe’s breath still right there. Coming out gently. And then, with the final click of zoom, down to where we could see the roof gravel, her breath went in again, a full breath, very quick.
There were letters down there on the roof. Skyward-facing graffiti, might have been fifty feet end-to-end running west to east across the gravel. Oriented as if designed expressly for satellite viewing.
The letters read: Not a single word.
We exited the random and entered the patterned stage of things. It was an intimacy, nothing less than that. A closeness to purpose and meaning, however invisible those both might be. We searched our experience and imagination. But mostly, we tumbled within the pattern. Not a single word. An ending. A closing off.
“A warning,” she said.
“Last lines,” I said.
“A suicide note?” SaBe offered.
I was pacing, pegging up and down the dark wood of Grieg-son’s living room. “Last line of a song. A poem.”
“Or a book,” she said. And then we both listened to the sound that idea made in seconds of silence.
Ultramarine blue outside. Sunshine City slept to a Zamfir soundtrack, but SaBe and I worked. We went through those shelves book by book and we found it. Top shelf, far corner. Saul Bellow. Herzog. A little paperback bound in blue. And when she opened to the last page, I saw her hands start to tremble.
“At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing,” she read. “Not a single word.”
I took the book from her and searched the spine with my fingers. Mail order. I shook the pages gently and watched the business card fall free onto the bedspread.
The card read: Fate Systems Incorporated.
No point phoning the phone number. The old man in the car wash had said prank? I wondered now. But I still mapped up the Fate Systems address. SaBe and I together now, she was right at my shoulder, her already familiar warmth and smell, we drilled down and down. And out there at a hook in the coastal highway near Bodega, at the listed address—38.3298 by 123.0112—there it was. A low building with abandoned-looking trucks out back.
We zoomed. We zoomed. We found the fifty-foot letters. They read: People with no soul.
I woke to my phone buzzing somewhere nearby but missed the call. Mid-morning. Fog rolling around the corners of my memory. I blinked. Then I moved sharply as a single detail simmered up out of the folds of grey. I rolled off the couch where I’d been sleeping and went to the doorway of Griegson’s bedroom, cracked the door quietly and looked in, but she was gone. The bed neatly made, a note left to float in the middle of its king-sized emptiness. Hope you slept all right out there. Call me.
No number. Which I might have wondered about if my phone hadn’t started humming again. If I hadn’t lunged back into the front room, tripped on a ceramic lion guarding the perimeter of the ersatz fireplace and gone down headlong. I lay stunned, my phone just then dropping off the arm of the couch and bouncing onto the carpet next to my ear.
I opened it. I said: “Hi, Frick.”
We met down at the driving range. I walked over, waving off cart after cart, people stopping to try to help the sweating gimp with the briefcase and the bed-head, one-sticking his way down between the blooming gingers and flowering ornamental banana trees. The gaping, besotted orchids and drunken, sprawling vines.
I found Frick in his cribbed-off corner at the far end of the lower tier of tee-boxes, facing out from under a shade awning into a wide set of hypothetical holes separated by trees and traps, roved over not just by tractors—as I remembered the last driving range I’d been on, over twenty years prior—but by individual ball collectors. Security-checked kids from the Rough, I’d heard. Paid by the day to hand-pick balls out of the spots the tractors couldn’t reach, all of them armoured head-to-toe in riot-squad gear that made them look like black samurai out there, lumbering around in their leg- and shoulder-pads, helmets with visors, ball-retrieving tools. Sometimes you’d see one of them take a knee when they were hit in the back, or at the joint at the side of the knee. Then they’d hold up a hand to signal a tractor to come over and shield them while they recovered.
Frick’s corner tee-box had white leather benches for visitors and a fridge for sodas and beer. Have a drink, he gestured, but I shook my head and sat, watching him tee up, then stroke out a three wood. He was either hitting draw or just hooking, hard to tell at first. We both watched the ball head out straight then bend left. The ratchet overspin bounce that took it even farther left and out of play. That whole time watching, Frick never moved from the top of his follow-through, frozen in that pretentious awards-night statuette position golfers learn to strike after a shot, absorbing the magnificence of what they’ve done. Ball mid-flight, heading to the woods half the time. Shanked it. Scuffed it. Pushed it. Got under it. There were a dozen such low- syllable mutterings golfers kept loaded up and ready to drop on the moment, as required.
“Came across it,” Frick said, uncoiling from his pose.
“Coming across generally makes you fade the ball,” I pointed out. “Or slice.”
Frick re-enacted the shot with his rear hand, right in his case. Here was another undying habit of the 18-holers. You hold your hand flat and swing through the imaginary plane of the ball, so correcting in a single sweep all previous error. The imaginary ball flying as it should, that is, never deviating from the course as visualized in the will.
Frick stood down from the tee-box and cracked the fridge, took out a type of Italian orange soda I hadn’t seen since the IAF years. Heyday soda. Good times soda. He looked over at me and said: “Frick just noticing his buddy Hoss looks like shit.”
I said: “Well wait until you hear this next part.”
Frick sipped his soda calmly for the first while I spoke. Then he climbed back up onto the tee-box and tipped a wire-mesh bucket of balls over, letting them spill out onto the Astro-turf surface. He started stroking these out with a five-iron. Click, click. He had all the mechanical automation of the long-timer. Didn’t over-think each shot. Didn’t act like there was much to be improved. But he was still spraying them. I watched the distribution while I told him the story about Griegson’s books. And Frick put thirty-five balls down the fairway during this time, about evenly distributed into a zone twenty yards deep and sixty yards across, which only meant to me that over three or four entire games worth of five-iron approach shots, Frick was probably on the green twice. Yet he was number two on the leaderboard with a handicap of three. Welcome to Sunshine City: Cheaterville. Caddies dropping balls, members skipping strokes. Who wouldn’t be dying to get out of this place?
When I got to the end of the strange chain of books and business cards and rooftop messages, Frick was almost through the bucket. And he looked down at the bottom of the range to the tractor and the kids scuttling from tree to trap to pond. He shaded his eyes. Then Frick said: “So what you’re saying is you find this unusual.”
I went to the fridge and found a Mexican beer. I took a wedge of lime from the bowl and pinched it into the neck of the bottle. I said: “Statistically speaking, call it impossible without planning, deliberation, motive, wherewithal. It’s a major problem for me to know this about Griegson and still tell the story you’re after. Random event. Bullet comes flying in from the hills, my ass. There’s a worm in the apple, Frick. There’s aspiration at the heart of these affairs. The numbers aren’t flowing your direction. They’re heading back towards causes in Griegson’s sphere. They’re flooding back into Sunshine City.”
I drank a long pull of the beer and Frick paced. He was going to recap now, I felt it forming: the point-form summary counted off on the gloved fingers of his left hand. So a business card in Griegson’s pocket led to an address, which led to a building, on the roof of which there was some graffiti.
“Check,” I said. “Which is odd, although not yet freakishly unlikely.”
And the graffiti turns out to
be the last line of a book Grieg-son owned.
“A book many people own,” I corrected. “Only Griegson had both the business card and the book. So now we’re talking smaller chances. Ramping orders of unlikelihood.”
Frick accepted another bucket of balls from one of the range kids. He spaced a dozen of these across the front lip of the Astro-turf tee-box and fished out his nine.
And in that book, Frick continued—“Herzog,” I said—in that book there was another business card with another address, which led to some more graffiti.
“People with no soul,” I said, nodding, taking another long pull of beer.
Which was the last line of another book Griegson owned, Frick said, bobbing in place, then lobbed a nine-iron out towards the nearest pin. It dropped onto the front edge of the green, then spun backwards down to the fringe.
“Island of the Day Before,” I told him. “Umberto Eco.”
“All right,” Frick said. “All right. And in that book, we find yet another card.”
“Structured magnitudes of impossibility. Forget the numbers,” I told him. “There is no computation required. Three turns around this business and it just isn’t nature.”
“And we’re not even through yet,” Frick said.
Definitely not through, I told him. Another address, which led to more rooftop graffiti: No symbols where none intended, which is the last line from Beckett’s book Watt. Which Griegson also owned, yes.
“Moving us into impossible land,” I told him. “You follow me?”
Frick put his next shot a couple yards farther up the green, but pushed it right. The ball dropped and corkscrewed, then stuck on a bad part of the slope, twelve feet above the hole.
“Impossible land,” Frick repeated. “And how many of these graffiti/book combinations did you and SaBe find?”
I told him the number. A big number. “Thirty-four and we had to stop. The two of us had to get some sleep.”
Frick looked up at me sharply with these words, then forced his eyes back to the ball. Something he normally repressed was briefly released: an amped-up curiosity about SaBe’s whereabouts at night, at bedtime. Guarded interests. Intrigue and leaderboards. How I hated this place, while saying nothing about it, just carrying on with the unlikely chain of books and business cards, graffiti and last lines. Looping in and out, from the Rough to the cabanas. Beckett to Flannery O’Connor to Martin Amis to Dostoyevsky to Janet Frame to a line on a hardware store out near the coastal highway and the rooftop banner that told us: There’s no need to say another word.
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